Case Study: Erik Johansson - Photography

Erik Johansson is a photographer and retoucher from Sweden based in Berlin, Germany. Working both on personal and commissioned projects. Growing up on the Swedish countryside had a big impact on his visual style. A lot of the environments in his photos are captured near places he knows, around his parent’s home with wide open landscapes and small red houses.

Erik Johansson says, “Inspiration is everywhere and once you learn the tools you are only limited by your own imagination”.

“At the age of 15 I got my first digital camera and it opened a new world to me. Being used to the process of drawing it felt quite strange to be done after capturing a photo, it wasn’t the process of creating something in the same way as drawing. You didn’t start with a white empty paper; once you pressed the trigger you were done. I early felt like I wanted to do something more to the photos and having an interest in computers made it quite a natural step to start here. That is how my interest in photo manipulation started. I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to bring to life and it was a lot about problem solving trying to make it look as realistic as possible.”

Erik Johansson is as much a photographer as a retoucher which enables him to create almost anything that you can imagine. Having an understanding of each step of the process gives total control of the whole work process from sketch to final image to ensure a high quality realistic result.

Erik continues, “I don’t capture moment, I capture ideas. To me photography is more about capturing material, material that I will put together in the computer to create a place that doesn’t exist, even though I want it to look as if it could. I only use the best tools available, a digital Hasselblad camera to capture every little detail with amazing color reproduction and powerful homebuilt PC to put material together. To me an EIZO ColorEdge monitor is one of the most important tools to put together my images in a realistic way where seeing the right colors are crucial, color that I can be sure will be the same when I make a print.”

“I am a perfectionist and the color reproduction on my ColorEdge monitor is close to perfect. My computer is equipped with nVidia Quadro graphics card so I can take advantage of the 30-bit colors of my monitor. The monitor is also self-calibrating regularly to make sure that the colors I see on the screen are the same as what I will see on my prints. I use my EIZO monitor every day and I would not go back to something else.”